On November 1, 2025, President Donald Trump threatened to end all U.S. assistance to Nigeria and — if he deemed it necessary — launch a military attack against insurgents in the country. As National...
I’ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of “responsibility,” specifically in the context of politics and governance. We live in an age of populism, rising authoritarianism, disinformation,...
I had high hopes for director Kathryn Bigelow’s House of Dynamite, a new Netflix movie about U.S. nuclear command and control. There’s so much potential for cinema to unpack the dilemmas and...
Dr. Benjamin de Carvalho joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Ben was born in Switzerland to a mother from Norway and a father from Brazil. Ben talks about how that transpired, growing up in Norway, and how a Fulbright brought him to the United States in the late 90's. Ben recounts his time at the...
I get emails. Sometimes they find me well; sometimes they try to convince me that I need to bring artificial intelligence (“AI”) into the classroom. “AI is going to revolutionize higher education!” “Prepare your students for the AI-driven job market!” "Resistance is futile!" “Sign up for our...
Drew Hogan answers 6+1 questions about how the United States does, and does not, support its overseas citizens.
The foreign policy world is still making sense of the Trump Administration's massive cuts to the US State Department last week. Under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, nearly 1500 employees--most of them civil servants--lose their jobs. In some ways, this isn't surprising, as Trump began his second...
Kenneth Waltz famously claimed that anarchy—i.e., the absence of a global sovereign—is the ordering principle of world politics, and much International Relations (IR) scholarship since then has aimed to debunk the claim that anarchy defines IR as a subject. Today, some aim to do so by offering new...
Over two decades have passed since the horrifying 9/11 attacks. Do we have a consensus understanding of the radicalization process in communities that supported or filled the ranks of jihadist groups, including the likes of al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, Hamas, and the Taliban? The answer (see also...
I dislike the term “soft power.” We owe the term to the late, great Joseph Nye. He popularized it in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead. Nye’s book was, first and foremost, an intervention in the “declinism” debates of the later 1980s. Japan was at the peak of its influence; some projected that its...
Dominant theories of international political economy leave little room for the influence of individuals. They also never anticipated that the United States might seek to completely upend the global economic order.
I've had four potential posts on Israel, anti-Israel actions and antisemitism this week. As new events occur, the old post falls to the wayside. I was stuck on whether I should pick one, or try to weave the events together into some kind of narrative and draw conclusions. I've decided I can't, or...
Renowned international relations scholar and practitioner Joseph S. Nye passed away last week. Numerous tributes have been written, noting his high quality scholarship and influence on US foreign policy. While most have discussed his major idea--soft power--I'd encourage today's IR scholars to...
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” is something I would say at the risk of alienating the younger readership of this blog, but given that most of us are old here, it should be fine. I have been busy working on Russian Neo-Nazis, so I almost forgot that back in the simpler times...
Charles A. Dainoff, Robert M. Farley, and Geoffrey F. Williams answer questions about their new book